


By the Seaside

by sual



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Love Confessions, M/M, Trans Character, weirdos in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-09-10
Packaged: 2018-12-26 03:12:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12050079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sual/pseuds/sual
Summary: The number one cause of death in immortals, in Undertaker’s long, long (much too long) experience, isn’t silver bullets or holy water or stakes to the heart; it’s boredom. One needs a healthy sense of whimsy to survive eternity. Whether it’s deserting your God-given post as a reaper to become a mortician or whether it’s tinkering about with the divine laws of life and death, nobody ever got anywhere without following their flights of fancy.This is why, after a sudden hankering for the seaside around breakfast time that morning, he finds himself on a sandy beach in Cornwall with his mistress.That, and he really wanted to see Grell in a swimsuit.





	By the Seaside

**Author's Note:**

> I've shipped these two hard since 2009 or something, but this is the first fic I've ever written for them. Hope there's still other people out there that will enjoy it lol. [All of my headcanons for Grell are very much influenced by the "The Most Beautiful Death in the World" musical, she's just so adorable in that.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfg5z6_zHhI) I feel like if she ever got any actual affection, she wouldn't know entirely what to do with it.

The number one cause of death in immortals, in Undertaker’s long, long (much too long) experience, isn’t silver bullets or holy water or stakes to the heart; it’s boredom. One needs a healthy sense of whimsy to survive eternity. Whether it’s deserting your God-given post as a reaper to become a mortician or whether it’s tinkering about with the divine laws of life and death, nobody ever got anywhere without following their flights of fancy.

This is why, after a sudden hankering for the seaside around breakfast time that morning, he finds himself on a sandy beach in Cornwall with his mistress.

That, and he really wanted to see Grell in a swimsuit.

From under the pitch-black tent he’d set up earlier, furnished with towels and a small collection of the decorative pillows that seem to have found their way into his life with ever increasing abundance since Grell finally took up with him, he has an excellent view of the shinigami where she splashes about nearer the surf. He had been terribly disappointed in her choice of bathing gear – just a modest little sailor dress with knee-length bloomers (in red, naturally). Honestly, all these young reapers claim to be so modern and forward thinking…where was the _skin_? The _scandal_?!

Still, his sour mood had been short-lived. As expected of his lady, she’d given him a good long laugh by running face first into the ocean as soon as they’d stepped through the portal with an ungodly shriek of joy, emerging from the waves moments later with a fish between her bloody teeth like a shark and seaweed tangled in her braids. They shared the fish for lunch raw, after which point the midday sun reminded him that hot weather was in fact most disagreeable to bone-pale skin. He retreated under their tent, and now the beginnings of sunburn have him reflecting on just why he hasn’t been to the seaside in over a century.

Undertaker sighs, letting his gaze drift lazily back to Grell. She’s bent over in the surf with a bucket in one hand and a lacey white parasol hooked over her shoulder, collecting shells from the sand like a little child. When the salty breeze blows just right, little snippets of the off-key tune she’s humming to herself carry over to him. Lord, but she can’t hold a note to save her life.

Lord, but he loves her.

Since the Ripper case, he’d known she was meant for greater things than reaping; he said as much to her on the Campania, before she tried to grind his face up with her chainsaw. Here was a kindred soul ruled almost entirely by her whims, another unfortunate that William and the rest of shinigami dispatch tried to strangle the spirit out of (sometimes literally).

She held out against his repeated requests for her to join him for longer than he expected, perhaps driven by an attachment to her colleagues. But then, that very same attachment was what found her on his doorstep three months ago with a broken heart and puffy, tear-stained eyes ( _her own trainee in William’s arms_ ).

All he had to do to get the poor, neglected creature to stay was want her back. He tilts his head appreciatively as Grell bends over to dig something up from the sand, the arse he knows is covered in scratches from his long nails, under that pleated skirt, sticking up in the air (he put them there last night, gripped her hips as if the afterlife depended on it) – it’s easy to give in to lust, with her. Love, though… _that_ has crept up on him quite without his permission.

A sudden shriek of delight pulls him from his musings, looking up just in time to see Grell hurtling back towards the tent, kicking sand up everywhere.

“Darling, look!” she cries, crashing into his side to take her usual place on his arm, clinging like a limpet. “I’ve found you a present!”

Undertaker smiles down at her indulgently while she rummages in her bucket. “Ohhh? For me?” he coos, preparing himself to pretend to be excited about some seashell or other. He’s far more interested in the slip of her collar down her shoulder, and the livid bruise he’d sucked into the skin there that it reveals.

Instead of a shell, Grell presents him with a bloated, rotting finger.

“Look, look! What do you think?” she grins widely, teeth glinting. “Maybe a fish bit it off. Oh, but were they alive at the time, I wonder?”

It takes him a moment for the surprise to wear off. Then he howls with laughter, because of course, _of course_ , there’s a reason he chose Grell of all reapers, after all. He’s not sure if he can’t breathe because of the affection threatening to burst out of his chest or if it’s because he’s laughing so hard. His lady makes a pleased expression, like a cat that just brought its master a dead bird, while she waits for him to stop squawking, long used to this by now.

“Oohoo, eeheehee, let me- here, let me see,” he wheezes, gesturing weakly for the finger. She passes it over eagerly. “No no, no fish – blunt force, I think. Drowned corpse, smashed against the rocks during a storm. Heehee, he was dead and disgusting already.”

“You’re so sure it was a he?” she huffs, stealing the finger back to squint at it behind her glasses. “Liar, it’s far too waterlogged to tell a thing! Maybe we can find the rest of the body though, it can’t be far…there’s rocks and cliffs a few miles south, but I don’t really care enough to walk. Hmm, but is there any of a cinematic record in just a finger? Is that where muscle memory goes?”

She twitters on relentlessly, but Undertaker is hardly listening. There is a beautiful self-declared woman next to him discussing a rotten finger like it’s the weather. The sunlight outside the tent reflects off her knife-sharp teeth with every word she speaks. She’s immortal, like he is, like his past loves never were. Her blood red hair curls with saltwater. She’s everything he never knew he wanted.

Grell squeaks with shock at the sudden press of lips against her own.

“I love you,” he murmurs into the kiss, close enough to feel her teeth.

It’s hard to truly fluster Grell, with the outrageous things she says and does, but this simple confession seems to have managed it – her cheeks suddenly become as red as her hair, and she stutters uncontrollably for a full minute. It’s _delightful._ So he says it again, looming over her to whisper it in the shell of her ear, and again when she makes an amusingly strangled noise in her throat.

Out of pure panic, she bites down on his shoulder. Hard.

Her teeth are sharp enough that he should be howling in pain, but the reaction is too funny for him to hold in the roar of laughter that comes out of him instead. She lets go just as fast at the noise of it, and Undertaker rolls backwards onto the towels spread over the sand, clutching his sides as he cackles.

“Don’t- don’t laugh!” she yells, fists clenched, but her cheeks are still so pink and her expression is so indignant that he just laughs harder. “If you keep laughing, I won’t say it back!!”

“That was- ahaa- that was you t-trying to- _aahahaha!_ \- s-say it back!?” he gasps, tears streaming from his eyes.

Grell stomps to her feet with a huff, collecting up the decaying finger as she marches out of the tent. She can’t truly be angry, though, because she doesn’t fight too much when he grabs her around the waist to drag her kicking back under the shade of the tent and into his lap.

“Hooo…now where are you going with my present, hmm?” he grins against her neck, out of breath from laughing so hard.

She crosses her arms and sticks her nose up in the air. “If you’re just going to laugh at me I’ll throw it back in the ocean,” she declares. “Maybe I’ll look for the rest of the body and _he_ can be my boyfriend instead. At least a corpse can keep its mouth shut.”

“Ohhh! And just after I declared my love for you,” he coos, kissing his way noisily up her throat to her jaw. “I won’t allow it.”

He plucks the finger out of her grip lightning fast, with the unnatural reflexes being an ex-reaper affords him. “And besides, it was a present! You already gave it to me. Can’t take it back now. Heehee,” Undertaker grins. Grell makes a half-hearted attempt to snatch it back that he dodges easily. “I think I’ll preserve it in formaldehyde. A token of my lady’s affection.”

Grell softens visibly. “You like it that much?”

“Of course,” Undertaker nods, dragging one long nail up from her clavicle, over her Adam’s apple to her chin, tipping it up for a brief kiss. “It’s proof of just how perfect you are. Who else is disturbed enough to bring me body parts for fun?”

She nips at his mouth in warning. His lips are forever covered in little scratches these days. When it only gets her another chuckle, Grell burrows her face against the black and white striped swimsuit covering his chest, muttering something under her breath that sounds suspiciously like, “Love you too, you creep.”

Later, he’ll ask her to show him the rest of her bucket, a collection not of shells but of little shards of bone, two fish skulls, a gold coin, the rusty blade of an old dagger and several poisonous sea urchins. Later, when the sun is fading, he’ll drag her into the waves over his shoulder and throw her into the water, and she’ll only try to strangle him a little bit. Later, if he’s _really_ good and doesn’t laugh too hard at her getting saltwater up her nose, she might let him make love to her in a coffin (oh, she hates sleeping in them with him, but she hates sleeping without him more).

For now, Undertaker tugs Grell backwards to lie with him in his nest of towels and pillows, the weight of her on his chest, the seagulls shrieking in the sky and the crashing of the surf lulling him into a contentment reapers were never supposed to know.


End file.
